Sven Lütticken

Secret Publicity
Essays on Contemporary Art

Design: Nienke Terpsma, Illustrated (b/w), Paperback, sewn, 208 pages, Format: 14 x 21 cm
English edition, ISBN 90-5662-467-9 / 978-90-5662-467-5, € 26.00
Dutch edition, ISBN 90-5662-468-7 / 978-90-5662-468-2

In association with the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB)

Contemporary art absorbs an endless multitude of objects, images and discourses from the surrounding culture. Does this mean that art has forfeited its capacity to make a difference? Or does such a generic art in fact enable a critical and reflexive use of the imported material, and thus the development a critical publicness within the contemporary spectacle?

More than ever, the question is how art can be more than just a prestigious commodity – how it can create and maintain a space for difference in contemporary culture. To this end artists, attempts to reactivate impulses from the history of the avant-garde, and the essays on contemporary art in this collection also reflect upon various twentieth-century movements and artists such as Georges Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie, the Situationist International, Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Warhol.

Sven Lütticken regularly publishes critical and theoretical texts on art in Artforum, De Witte Raaf, New Left Review and Texte zur Kunst, among others. He is the first laureate of the Dutch Art Criticism Award, granted by the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

To mark the publication of this book, debates are being organized in Amsterdam, Brussels, London and New York in spring 2006.

> Last copies available at NAi Booksellers